This week's episode of Algorithms Live! features the return of scott_wu. In the episode we discuss his involvement in Venture Cup, the interest of venture capitalists and tech companies in competitive programming, his work as a commentator for this year's Topcoder Open, the relationship of esports to competitive programming, and the problem 626F - Групповые проекты from the first Venture Cup. Most of the episode is podcast style, so I've included time links in advance to make it is easier to navigate to parts of the discussion that interest you. :)

This week's episode features Mikhail Tikhomirov (Endagorion). You may know Mikhail from his many problems in Codeforces or other online judges. He has been a finalist of TCO and Google Code Jam and helped host the Barcelona Programming Bootcamp. Mikhail is an ICPC coach for Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology. His teams have earned two gold medals and a silver medal at ACM ICPC World Finals in the past few years. He also has a YouTube channel where he regularly post screencasts.

In this episode we will be discussing his problem 868G - Пещеры Эль-Толль from the Barcelona Bootcamp. This is a math intensive problem with close relationship to the Euclidean algorithm.

If you have any questions for Mikhail, please leave comments on this post with the question or ask the question live during the stream.

This week's episode features monsoon as a special guest. Tomasz Idziaszek was an ICPC World Finalist from 2005 and a TCO Finalist from 2004-2005. He is an author of over 100 problems, including many hard and interesting problems from Algorithmic Engagements. He was an editor for the polish educational magazine Delta and the famous competitive programming book "Looking for a Challenge?". In 2018 he was a problem setter for the IOI. He also maintains the website http://www.algonotes.com/ that offers interesting educational materials on advanced algorithms.

In this episode we discuss the history behind "Looking for a Challenge?" and his famous problem Termites (online judge), which was included in the book. This problem is truly beautiful and I hope many of you will enjoy the episode.

Update: Anyone interested in the getting a copy of the Looking for a Challenge book can find information in this blog post. You can also solve the recommended Woodworms task by seeing the problem statement at this link and on an online judge in this link.

This week's episode will feature Errichto and will take place on Sunday, December 16th. If you are interested in viewing the live stream, you can find the link here or view the video after the stream following the same link.

Many of you know Errichto as a prolific problem writer and his recent appearances in TCO, Google Code Jam, Facebook Hacker Cup, and many other programming contest finals. He represented the University of Warsaw in the 2018 ACM ICPC World Finals, where his team placed 14th. This year he started an educational stream for competitive programming that is growing in popularity.

In this episode, we will discuss the benefits of educational streaming in competitive programming and ideas for making competitive programming more popular. Topics will include: how programming contests relate to e-sports, broadcasts for programming competition finals and how they can be improved, and algorithms videos on YouTube and what we would like to see in the future for popularizing the sport. I think this will be a fun podcast style stream. Please ask questions on this post for ideas that you would like to see discussed.

As with all Algorithms Live! episodes, we will be discussing an interesting algorithmic programming challenge. In this episode, we will discuss Errichto's problem 1025F - Disjoint Triangles. As build up to this problem, we will also be discussing Interstellar Battle from Bubble Cup earlier this year. This is sure to be an exciting episode with many interesting topics and ideas.

See you live!

Update: We moved the stream to next Saturday at the same time. This way we do not conflict with today's Codeforces round.

Update 2: A friendly reminder that this episode will be streamed live in 15 hours.

Today I'm kicking off a new series on maximum flows on my YouTube channel Algorithms Live!. The first episode is already available and I've discussed some of this idea in a blog post. The series will focus on flows without costs and will cover both the algorithms and patterns of problem.

I'll be interspersing the episodes with some guest episodes to keep things interesting. One will be with Errichto, though we are still working out the details as he has been travelling for TCO and Hacker Cup. That episode will cover educational streaming and an interesting problem he wrote. Another episode will be with a Looking for a Challenge? author.

This post is to mostly gather topic ideas for the flow series and to collect questions to ask some of the future guests in the episodes. What problems/ideas would you like to see covered in the flow series? What questions would you like to see answered by the future guests?